14. Marie [?] to ME, [1932?]; Florence Southard to ME, 1942 [?], EM.
15. EE to ME, February 16, 1938, EEM.
16. ME to CC, March 26, 1939, EM.
17. “Because you dared divingly . . . For Creigh, August 1938,” typescript, collection of Catherine Stern, VT; Poems of Five Decades, 121.
18. Creigh Collins was born on May 6, 1920, in Chicago, the daughter of Harriet Oliphant Collins and John Joseph Collins, an engineer. Biographical information from her daughters Catherine Stern and Chris Stern Hyman as well as from her obituary, Journal Opinion, Bradford, Vermont, July 27, 1994.
19. EE, “For Creigh” (January 1939), from the papers of Creigh Collins Stern, New York.
20. CC, “Song,” January 6, 1939, EM.
21. CC to ME, January 12, 1939; ME to CC, January 14, 1939, EM.
22. Poems of Five Decades, 122.
23. CC to ME, February [?], 1939; ME to CC, February 11, February 16, February 19, 1939, EM.
24. ME to CC, March 20, 1939, EM.
25. ME to CC, March 22, 1939, EM.
26. CC to ME, March 24, 1939; ME to CC, March 29, 1939; CC to ME, March 29, 1939.
27. ME to CC, April 2, 1939, EM.
28. ME to CC, April 15, 1939; CC to ME, April 20, 1939, EM.
29. CC to ME, April 21, 1939, EM.
30. Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry, vii–viii, xi.
31. CC to ME, April 25, 1939; ME to CC, April 27, 1939, EM.
32. EE to CC, April 27, 1939, EM.
33. CC to ME, May 28, 1939, EM.
34. “To All Active Supporters of Democracy and Peace,” Nation 148 (August 26, 1939): 228.
35. IR to ME, March 23, 1939, EM.
36. CC to ME, [May 1939]; ME to CC, June 4, 1939, EM.
37. EE to CC, June 7, 1939, telegram, EM. The “Studs Lonigan Athletic Club,” captained by Farrell, was to meet the Marxist Maulers, captained by “Snorky” Jim Cannon, on June 10 in a benefit for German, Austrian, and Czech fighters against fascism. “American Fund to Benefit by Baseball Game,” Socialist Appeal (May 30, 1939): 2.
38. ME to CC, June 22, June 23, July 1, 1939, EM.
39. CC to ME, April 1940 [?], EM; ME to EE, April 29, April 30, 1942, EEM.
40. Chris Stern Hyman, personal conversation, August 23, 2013.
41. CC, “Half Fled,” n.d., EM.
42. ME to Martha Ellis, January 18, 1940, EM. For more on Martha Ellis, see her biographical sketch and poems included in An Atlanta Argosy: An Anthology of Atlanta Poetry (Atlanta: Franklin, 1938).
43. Martha Ellis, “To Max, Loquacious at 2 A.M.,” EM.
44. ME to Martha Ellis, April 4, 1940, EM.
45. ME to Martha Ellis, January 18, 1940, EM.
46. ME to Martha Ellis, January 20, January 21, 1940, EM.
47. Stalin’s Russia, 63, 144, 155.
48. Dan Eastman and Eleanora Deren, “No Workers State without Workers Control,” Internal Bulletin of the Organizing Committee for the Socialist Party Convention 2 (1937): 36–37; ME to Vladimir Simkhovitch, draft, undated, EMIIA2. Max was so impressed with Dan’s essay that he suggested he use it as a writing sample in his application for graduate study at Columbia.
49. Stalin’s Russia, 181, 159–60.
50. Stalin’s Russia, 161, 89–90.
51. Stalin’s Russia, 170, 181, 104, 157, 220–23, 241.
52. Stalin’s Russia, 213.
53. Stalin’s Russia, 205, 202, 245, 253, 255, 256.
54. Stalin’s Russia, 69, 81.
55. Eugene Lyons, “The Light that Failed,” Saturday Review, March 16, 1940.
56. John R. Chamberlain, “Up from Marxism,” Common Sense (April 1940): 25–26.
57. Michael T. Florinsky, “Max Eastman’s Critical Examination of Stalin’s Russia,” New York Times Book Review, March 17, 1940.
58. Abram L. Harris, “The Crisis in Marxism,” Nation, June 8, 1940.
59. Harold J. Laski, “Critic of Stalin,” New Statesman and Nation, September 14, 1940.
60. Elias L. Tartak, “Books and Writers: Max Eastman, Stalin and Marx,” New Leader 23, no. 12 (March 23, 1940): 2.
61. Paul Jordan-Smith, “What I Liked Last Week,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1940.
62. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (Garden City: Doubleday, 1940), 392, 472, 474.
63. Edmund Wilson, “Marxism at the End of the Thirties,” in The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1952), 732–43. Wilson later admitted that some of his main concepts had come straight from Max’s books (Wilson to ME, January 2, 1960, EMIIA1).
64. E. E. Cummings to ME, September 27, 1942; Edna St. Vincent Millay to ME, telegram, October 12, 1942; Marianne Moore to Ramona Herdman, September 28, 1942, all EM. The allusion is to Moore’s poem “Poetry” (1919), which begins, “I, too, dislike it.” Granville Hicks’s comment was solicited by the publisher and appears on a sheet of blurbs in EM.
65. ME to Edmund Wilson, August 31, 1942, cc, EM.
66. ME to Ramona Herdman, 1942 [?], EM.
67. Lot’s Wife, 4, 3, 12.
68. Sheet of blurbs for Lot’s Wife, EM.
69. Lot’s Wife, vii, 3, 1–2.
70. Lot’s Wife, 7, 38, 27.
71. Edmund Wilson to ME, September 26, 1942, EM.
72. All subsequent quotations are from Wilson’s copy of the galleys in EM.
73. Lot’s Wife, 2, 12, 19.
74. Lot’s Wife, 29.
75. “Lot’s Wife, by Max Eastman,” Nation, May 16, 1943.
76. Paul H. Oehser, “Sal O’Sodom,” Washington Post, October 25, 1942.
77. John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, December 15, 1942.
78. “The Vineyard Bookshelf: Lot’s Wife,” Vineyard Gazette, November 20, 1942.
79. “Van Loon’s Diary,” New Leader, March 13, 1943.
80. Letter to Americans, 13; “Books and Authors,” New York Times, July 27, 1941.
81. The sum Max received for “The Fate of the World Is at Stake in China,” Reader’s Digest (May 1944); ME to DeWitt Wallace, March 19, 1948, cc, EMII; “How I Got My Job on the Reader’s Digest,” July 9, 1952, EMII.
82. “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met”; “Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature,” Reader’s Digest 38 (June 1941): 37–40; 41–49.
83. J. R. Johnson, “Max Eastman Dives into Jingo Waters. So Perish All Traitors!” Labor Action 5.21 (May 26, 1941): 4.
84. Richard Lingeman, “Produced in Pleasantville,” New York Times, August 22, 1993.
85. “It is hard reasonably to complain,” June 25, 1954, EMII.
86. ME to FN, August 18, 1951, NMII.
87. “What We Laugh At—and Why,” Reader’s Digest 42 (April 1943).
88. DeWitt Wallace had moved the Digest’s offices to nearby Chappaqua in 1939, but he had retained the familiar postal address.
89. ME to EE, May 14, May 18, 1943, EEM.
90. “It is Crystal’s birthday,” June 25, 1954, EMII. Conversation with Stephen Lindsay, October 12, 2014, Martha’s Vineyard; Neal Balboni to Stephen Lindsay, November 15, 2001, EMIIA1.
91. EE to ME, [“Monday”], 1941 [?], EEM; ME to EE, April 30, 1942, EEM.
92. EE to ME, [“Saturday”], 1942 [?], EEM.
93. E. E. Cummings to ME, September 19, 1956, EM.
94. ME to Ernest A. Moore, November 5, 1945, draft, EM.
95. ME to Ernest A. Moore, November 5, 1945, EM.
96. EE to ME, [“Sunday”], 1941, EEM. Harry Laidler, the executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy, and Max appeared on Wake up, America on WJZ, June 7, 1942.
97. C. E. Alamshah to ME, October 8, 1946, EM.
98. ME to Carl Sandburg, January 30, 1946, cc, EM.
99. Joe O’Carroll to ME, n.d. [1947], EM; ME to O’Carroll, [1947], draft, EM.
100. “I spent the last evening,” fragment, September 11, 1944, EM.
&
nbsp; Chapter 9. Max in Purgatory
1. Dan Eastman to Marion Morehouse Cummings, June 12, 1942, June [?], 1942, Houghton, bmS Am 1823.2 (70).
2. See the website “The Civilian Public Service Story,” http://civilianpublicservice.org/workers/2431.
3. ME to IR, July 19, 1943, cc, EM.
4. ME to Edward C. Aswell, June 19, 1947, cc, EM.
5. ME to IR, October 2, 1947, cc; IR to ME, October [?], 1947, EMII.
6. FN, Journal, February 14, 1940, NMII.
7. Florence was in apartment 4RE at West Thirteenth Street, and Max and Eliena lived four floors up, in 8RE.
8. FN, Journal, April 2, 1948, NMII.
9. That said, money remained a continuing source of friction between Max and Florence; see, for example, FN, Journal, March 18, 1948, NMII; ME to FN, September 9, 1958, NM.
10. FN, Journal, January 13, March 24, 1945; May 19, 1946; April 3, 1949, NMII.
11. FN, Journal, January 15, 1945, NMII.
12. FN, Journal, March 24, 1945; April 27, 1945; July 10, 1945, NMII.
13. FN to ME, June 11, 1948, NM; FN, Journal, July 17, July 25, August 30, 1945, NMII.
14. “If I could summon the energy,” July 3, July 4, 1948, NM.
15. FN, Journal, October 30, November 19, 1945, NMII.
16. McKay to ME, December 7, 1943, MM.
17. McKay to ME, January 13, 1944, EMIIA2.
18. Likely an earlier version of the recently discovered McKay manuscript “Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem”; see Nick Obourn, “Detective Work Authenticates Novel by Harlem Renaissance Writer Claude McKay,” Columbia News, October 19, 2012.
19. McKay to John Macrae, August 8, 1941, cc; Macrae to McKay, August 7, 1941; McKay to ME, August 6, 1941, EMIIA1.
20. McKay to ME, November 26, 1943, EMIIA1.
21. ME to McKay, June 7, 1944, MM.
22. ME to EE, May 24, 1948; EE to ME, May 25, 1948, EEM.
23. Selected Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Bookman, 1953), 8, 110.
24. “Page for a Diary (Max’s version),” Havana, Cuba, February 16, 1946; “Eliena’s Version,” Havana, Cuba, February 16, 1946, EMII.
25. FN, Journal, October 30, 1945; April 28, 1946, NMII.
26. “It is Crystal’s birthday,” June 25, 1954, EMII.
27. ME to Boris Souvarine, July 26, 1946, Houghton, bMS FR 375 (370).
28. FN, Journal, April 29, 1946, NMII.
29. ME to DeWitt Wallace, March 19, 1948, cc, EMII.
30. FN, Journal, June 18, August 7, 1946; March 25, March 10, 1948, NMII.
31. “Enjoyment of Living, by Max Eastman,” Kirkus Reviews, March 31, 1948.
32. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1949), 4, 589.
33. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey: A Biography (1998; rpt. London: Pimlico, 2005), 31.
34. Sterling North, “Eastman Bolsters Kinsey Report,” Washington Post, April 4, 1948.
35. Mary McGrory, “Contrasting Memoirs from Two Authors: A Troubled Christian; a Resolute Pagan,” Washington Sunday Star, April 11, 1948; Charles W. Lawrence, “The Breakfast Commentator Has a Fine Time Reading a Book Before It Is Panned,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 7, 1948.
36. Granville Hicks, “Sorrows of Eastman,” Saturday Review (April 17, 1948).
37. Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey: A Biography, 313; Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior, 585, 582.
38. “Contrary to expectations” [1954], EMII.
39. North, “Eastman Bolsters Kinsey Report.”
40. “What will trouble me most . . .,” autobiographical fragment, July 2, 1954, EMII.
41. FN, Journal, April 16, 1948, NMII.
42. L. L. Stevenson, “Max Eastman Follows a Stern Physical Regimen,” Bluefield W. Va. Telegraph, June 15, 1948.
43. Mary Braggiotti, “Lively, Snowcapped Non-Communist Radical,” New York Post Magazine, July 1, 1948.
44. Floyd Dell, “Pagan Missionary on the Left: Dual Personality of Max Eastman Revealed in His Autobiography,” Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, April 11, 1948.
45. Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, April 2, 1948. For his notorious Nabokov review, see “Books of the Times,” New York Times, August 18, 1958.
46. John Abbot Clark, “A Paean to the Laughing Max Eastman,” Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1948.
47. Wolcott Gibbs, “Clare (A Fragment of Autobiography to the Tune of Max Eastman’s ‘Enjoyment of Living’),” New Yorker, May 8, 1948.
48. “Mary Haworth’s Mail,” Washington Post, May 16, 1948.
49. Lawrence, “The Breakfast Commentator.”
50. Floyd Dell to ME, [1948], EM. On a transcript of Dell’s letter Max noted that he had received it on April 16, 1948; ME to Floyd Dell, transcript, EM.
51. Upton Sinclair to ME, April 19, 1948, EM.
52. Alfreda Lindholdt to ME, August 2, 1963, EM.
53. FN, Journal, May 21, 1948, NMII.
54. “What will trouble me most,” July 2, 1954, EMII.
55. Eula Daniel to ME, [1947], EM.
56. FN, Journal, April 17, 1948, NMII.
57. June Johnson to ME, June 29, 1948, transcribed by Max (“From June’s letters”), EM.
58. ME to June Johnson, July 20, 1948, EM.
59. ME to June Johnson, June 18, 1948, EM.
60. ME to FN, July 30, 1948, NMII; ME to FN, January 31, 1949; FN, Journal, January 2, 31, 1949, NMII.
61. FN, Journal, December 22, 1948; FN to ME, March 5, April 13, 1949, NM.
62. FN, Journal, April 30, 1949, NMII.
63. “Conversation with a Queen,” Reader’s Digest (September 1949): 124–28.
64. ME to EE, May 19, 1949, EEM.
65. FN, Journal, October 4, 1948; May 18, 1949, NMII.
66. ME to FN, January 11, 1951, NMII.
67. ME to FN, February 2, 1951, NMII.
68. ME to FN, August 6, August 1, August 12, 1951, NMII.
69. ME to FN, August 12, August 18, 1951, NMII.
70. “A Dream and an Interpretation,” December 28, 1952, EMII.
71. ME to FN, August 25, September 1, 1951, NMII.
72. ME to FN, October 17, October 19, 1952, NMII.
73. ME to EE, September 10, 1953, EEM.
74. EK to Nell [Howell], cc, August 23, 1955, EEM.
75. EE to ME, June 27, 1953, EEM.
76. EE to ME, September 23, 1953, EEM. See also ME to EE, June 27, 1953: “Yes, let’s be happy and adventurous and have no more seizures—or, as you say, not many!” EEM.
77. ME to Louis Untermeyer, July 24, 1950, cc, EMII.
78. “The Anarchist Almanac,” Masses 5.6 (March 1914): 10.
79. “October Twenty-Fifth: An Illogical Duty” and “October twenty-sixth: The Only System of Government,” fragments of a book to be called “Summer Days,” EMII.
80. Werner Stecher to ME, June 20, 1954, EM. The article in question was “The Truth about Soviet Russia’s 14,000,000 Slaves,” Reader’s Digest (April 1947): 140–46. Max, touched by Stecher’s trials, sent $50 (ME to Werner Stecher, November 15, 1954, cc, EM).
81. ME to Floyd Dell, May 14, 1954, cc, EM; Reflections, 71.
82. “Buckley Versus Yale: A Seasoned Iconoclast Considers a Young Campus Rebel,” American Mercury (December 1951): 22–29.
83. ME to Sara Bard Field, January 21, 1955, EM.
84. Child of the Amazons, 34.
85. For the figure of the chinovnik, see Nikolai Gogol’s “Leaving the Theatre after the Presentation of a New Comedy” (1842).
86. ME to Floyd Dell, May 14, 1954, cc, June 27, 1954, cc, EM.
87. Editorial, “The Necessity of Red-Baiting,” The Freeman (June 1, 1953): 619; ME, “The Religion of Immoralism,” The Freeman (June 1, 1953): 622–24, 624; ME to Floyd Dell, September 16, 1954, EM.
88. “Foreword,” “Too Many People,” Poems of Five Decades, xv, 154.
89. Oliver St. John Gogarty, “A Poet in Love with Nature,” New York Times, October 17, 1954.
90. “Max Eastman’s Life Seen in ‘Poems of Five Decades,’” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1954.
91. Poems of Five Decades, xv.
92. Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 128. Debilitated by a stroke, Burnham eventually returned to the fold of the Only Holy Roman Catholic Church.
93. Reflections, 51, 37, 29, 40.
94. Nelson Frank, “Socialism Chains Liberty, Max Eastman Contends,” New York World-Telegram and Sun, April 5, 1955.
95. D. H. [likely David Herreshoff], “From Marx to Hoover,” American Socialist 2.7 (July 1955): 29–30.
96. ME to FN, May 8, 1955, NMII.
97. ME to FN, June 1, 1955, NMII.
98. ME to FN, July 1, 1955, NMII.
99. ME to FN, August 17, 1955, NMII.
100. ME to FN, September 28, 1955, NMII.
101. ME to Jacques Cattell, April 16, 1956, cc, EM.
102. ME to Edmund N. Goodman, April 20, 1956, cc, EM.
103. Eula Daniel to EE, 1956 [?], EM.
104. EE to Tom Filer, August 25, 1956, EEM.
105. “Note about Eliena,” October 22, 1956, EMII.
106. “More congenial to my nature”; “Though she had to watch her beautiful body,” EEM.
107. DE to ME, September 22, 1956, EM.
108. Dan’s finding that “marital happiness is related to self-acceptance, acceptance of others, and psychological status in both subjects and their mates” was the result of interviews with fifty couples. An abstract of his 1956 thesis appeared in the Journal of Consulting Psychology 22.2 (April 1958): 95–99.
109. EE to Ruth Pickering Pinchot, July 9, 1956; ME to Diana Lewis, October 21, 1956, EM.
110. “The nurse was having her afternoon off,” EMII.
111. In folder “Manuscripts, Poetry,” EMIIA2.
112. “Eliena Krylenko’s Message to Gay Head Friends, ‘A Word of Greeting and Best Wishes,’” Vineyard Gazette, October 12, 1956.
113. “Eliena,” Kinds of Love, 45. Max had written this poem on December 2, 1929, “on the train from Croton” (note on the autograph; EMII).
114. Ruth Pickering Pinchot to ME, [1956], EM.
115. EE, “A sparkling laughing stream,” EMIIA1.
Chapter 10. Realtor and Realist
1. ME to FN, February 27, 1957, cc, NMII.
Max Eastman Page 53